Introduction
Over four days in August, Salome Chavula did not gather a crowd. She met with women one at a time. From 11 to 14 August 2026, the Cohort 36 fellow from Malawi held individual sessions with six women running small businesses at Malosa Trading Centre in Zomba, working through the impact of budgeting with each of them separately, at a pace and depth a group setting rarely allows.
This one on one format shaped everything about Chavula's approach under her KAFI Financial Literacy Leadership Fellowship community project. Rather than delivering a single, standardized presentation to a room full of participants, she tailored each conversation to the specific business, income pattern, and financial habits of the woman sitting across from her, an investment of time that traded scale for depth.
Only two of the six women consented to having their photos taken during the sessions, a detail that speaks to the personal, sometimes sensitive nature of the conversations Chavula was conducting. Discussing income, business struggles, and financial gaps openly requires a level of trust that not every participant may feel ready to extend to public documentation, even while remaining fully willing to engage candidly in the private conversation itself.
A Curriculum Built for Working Business Owners
Across her sessions, Chavula covered a consistent set of core topics, budgeting, saving, income and expense tracking, the 50/30/20 percent budgeting rule, and mobile banking. Together, these subjects addressed both the foundational discipline small business owners need and the practical tools available to support that discipline in an increasingly digital financial environment.
What distinguished Chavula's sessions was her ability to adapt this shared curriculum to each participant's individual circumstances. Rather than treating budgeting, saving, and mobile banking as separate, generic lessons, she used the one on one format to explore how each concept applied specifically to the business and financial habits of the woman she was working with, an approach that would have been considerably harder to sustain within a larger group session.
Two Struggles Beneath the Surface
Through these individual conversations, Chavula uncovered patterns that speak to broader challenges facing small business owners in Malosa. Many participants struggled to save not from a lack of discipline, but because their income was often simply insufficient to cover basic needs in the first place, leaving little room for savings regardless of intention. This finding reframes the saving challenge many small business owners face, not as a failure of willpower, but as a genuine constraint requiring financial strategies calibrated to real, limited income rather than idealized savings targets.
A second pattern emerged around the separation of personal and business finances. Several participants found it difficult to keep these two categories distinct, a challenge rooted directly in limited income tracking practices. Without a clear system for recording what money belonged to the business and what belonged to the household, these two financial streams naturally blurred together, making it difficult for participants to accurately assess whether their businesses were actually profitable or simply functioning as an extension of household spending.
A Framework That Finally Made Sense
The individual feedback Chavula gathered illustrates how differently each woman responded to the shared curriculum, based on her own specific needs. One participant found particular value in the 50/30/20 percent budgeting rule, describing a newfound clarity around exactly how much of her income should go toward needs, wants, and savings respectively. For a business owner previously navigating spending decisions without any structured framework, this simple allocation rule offered something she could apply immediately and consistently, transforming a vague sense that she should be saving more into a concrete, actionable target.
Writing It All Down
A different participant responded most strongly to the session's emphasis on income tracking, developing a renewed commitment to recording her earnings daily and documenting everything related to her income. This shift toward consistent, detailed tracking addresses directly the second challenge Chavula had identified across her sessions, the blurred line between personal and business finances. A business owner who tracks her income diligently each day builds the foundation needed to eventually separate these two financial streams with confidence, replacing guesswork with an accurate, ongoing record of what her business actually generates.
Moving Money Out of the Shop and Into Safety
A third participant, who sells clothes at the trading centre, found particular relevance in the session's coverage of mobile banking. She had previously been keeping her income within her shop, and at times within her home, a practice that left her earnings vulnerable to loss or theft while also making it difficult to maintain any organized record of her income over time. Through the session, she came to understand how mobile banking applications could serve two purposes simultaneously, making income tracking considerably easier while also providing a genuinely safer place to store her earnings than cash kept on hand at her business or residence.
This shift carries particular significance for a business owner working within an informal retail environment, where cash kept on premises represents an ongoing security risk. By moving toward mobile banking, this participant addressed both a financial literacy gap and a very real, practical vulnerability in how she had been managing her business's income.
What Six Conversations Revealed
Taken together, these individual reflections point toward a broader conclusion Chavula drew from her four days of engagement, that even simple financial literacy knowledge can meaningfully help small business owners understand their finances more clearly, make better informed decisions, and move toward running more sustainable businesses over time. The specific, personalized nature of her sessions appears to have played a direct role in producing this outcome, since each woman left with lessons calibrated precisely to her own business's needs, rather than a generic set of principles she would need to translate into her own context afterward.
Lessons for Delivering Financial Education Effectively
Reflecting on her experience across these four days, Chavula arrived at a conclusion with implications well beyond her own project. She observed that financial education proves most effective when it directly addresses the real financial challenges people already face in their daily lives, a principle clearly borne out by how differently each of her six participants responded to the same shared curriculum, based on their own specific circumstances and struggles.
She further emphasized the importance of practical examples in making financial concepts accessible, and pointed to an additional factor she identified as even more valuable, delivering financial lessons in participants' own local languages. This observation speaks to a dimension of financial literacy work that extends beyond content alone, recognizing that the language in which financial concepts are delivered can significantly shape how accessible and genuinely understood that information becomes for the people receiving it.
The Value of Depth Over Reach
What distinguishes Chavula's approach as a Community Finance Leader is her willingness to prioritize depth of engagement over breadth of audience. Meeting with only six women across four days represents a modest scale compared to outreach efforts reaching dozens or hundreds of participants in a single session, yet the specificity and personal relevance of what each woman took away suggests this trade off produced genuine, individually tailored impact that a larger, less personalized session might have struggled to achieve.
As Chavula continues her work within Cohort 36, her sessions at Malosa Trading Centre stand as a clear demonstration of how one on one financial literacy engagement, though limited in scale, can uncover and address the specific, sometimes hidden financial challenges small business owners face, from income too limited to save, to blurred business and personal finances, to the simple but consequential risk of keeping cash unsecured in a shop or at home. Her experience also underscores a broader truth for financial literacy leaders more generally, that meeting people individually, in their own language, and around their own specific circumstances, often reveals challenges and opportunities that a larger, more generalized session might never surface at all.
Report Summary
Salome Chavula, a Cohort 36 fellow from Malawi, conducted individual, one on one financial literacy sessions with six women running small businesses at Malosa Trading Centre in Zomba, from 11 to 14 August 2026, as part of her KAFI Financial Literacy Leadership Fellowship community project on the impact of budgeting on small scale businesses. Sessions covered budgeting, saving, income and expense tracking, the 50/30/20 percent budgeting rule, and mobile banking. The discussions revealed that many participants struggled to save due to income that barely covered basic needs, and that limited income tracking often led to a blurring of personal and business finances. Individual feedback reflected the personalized value of the sessions, with one participant embracing the 50/30/20 rule for clearer income allocation, another committing to daily income tracking, and a third, a clothing seller, adopting mobile banking after previously keeping her earnings unsecured in her shop and home. Chavula concluded that financial education is most effective when it addresses people's real daily financial challenges directly, emphasizing the importance of practical examples and, ideally, delivering financial lessons in participants' own local languages.
